Chapter 1 - Indecision Theory

Summary

Abundant moments of indecision and delay shape George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876), which treats uncertainty as a recursive movement between interior and exterior, potentiality and activity. This chapter shows how Eliot explores action’s convoluted antecedents, drawing on intellectual trends in mid-century comparative method and physiological psychology, especially the latter’s portrait of embodied willing and pathologies of volition. These contexts frame a reading of the novel’s twin stances of practical experience and intellectual reflection: hesitation, the bewildering experience of having a “will which is and yet is not yet,” and its rational cousin, comparison, “our precious guide.” Formal fluctuations and portrayals of mental caprice would seem at cross-purposes with Eliot’s narrative control and moral coherence. Yet in discovering a “kinship” between certainty and doubt, she reinvigorates her novelistic ethics and recasts sympathy as guaranteed by “closer comparison between the knowledge which we call rational & the experience which we call emotional.” Her characters set store by irresolute stances of hesitation and comparison, and predictive affects like trust and hope.